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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1887. 



THE SCENERY OF SCOTLAND. 



The Scenery of Scotland viewed in Connexion with its 

 Physical Geology. By Archibald Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S. 

 (London : Macmillan, 1887.) 



nPHAT truth is great, and that it will in the end carry 

 J- the day, we are assured by the most venerable and 

 most hackneyed of aphorisms. We profess implicit belief 

 in the doctrine, but, as we survey the history of the 

 growth of opinion, our faith is apt to be rudely shaken 

 when we note countless instances of the marvellous per- 

 sistence and vitality of notions, however erroneous they 

 may be, when they have once become firmly rooted in 

 the minds of men. It is at such times hard to help doubt- 

 ing whether the vaunted power of knowledge is always 

 competent to sweep away the dead weight of prejudice 

 and obstinacy which cumbers the approaches to the 

 abode of truth. The infancy of every science furnishes 

 illustrations of the tenacity with which even men of 

 science cling to preconceived beliefs, none perhaps more 

 striking than that supplied by the branch of geology 

 which the volume before us is intended to illustrate. 



Well-nigh a century has slipped away since Hutton 

 enunciated the doctrine that the surface features of the 

 land are in the main due to the carving and sculpturing 

 action of denudation, and gave reasons for his belief 

 which are now held to be unanswerable by nearly every 

 geologist. But his proved to be a veritable voice crying 

 in the wilderness. Scrope reiterated the truth and en- 

 forced it by fresh examples, notably those furnished by 

 Auvergne ; but his testimony availed not to charm ears 

 still deaf or unwilling to be convinced. Even Ramsay, 

 afterwards a most strenuous champion of the doc- 

 trine, failed to see the whole truth when he wrote 

 his classical memoir on " The Denudation of the 

 South- West of England." Jukes struck the right note 

 in his memorable paper on " The River- Valleys of the 

 South of Ireland"; Ramsay, the year following, gave 

 precision and definite shape to the theory, which had 

 so long a birth-throe, in his " Physical Geology and 

 Geography of Great Britain"; Foster and Topley 

 showed how this theory furnished a rational explanation 

 of the growth of the puzzling physical geography of the 

 Weald of Kent and Sussex ; and Whitaker summed up 

 the evidence in its favour in a paper singularly exhaustive 

 in its facts and lucid in its arguments. Nothing perhaps 

 shows more forcibly the difficulty of persuading mankind 

 even to listen to views which seem new to them, than the 

 fact that Whitaker's singularly temperate and unaggres- 

 sive memoir was refused a place in their Quarterly Journal 

 by the Council of the Geological Society of London. 

 The writer may perhaps claim to have added his mite 

 when, following in the steps of these pioneers, he pointed 

 out how the striking escarpments and dip-slopes of the 

 Millstone Grit moors in Derbyshire and Yorkshire have 

 arisen. 



It was when the controversy was at its height that Dr. 

 A. Geikie furnished a weighty and memorable contribu- 

 tion to it in his work on " The Scenery of Scotland viewed 

 in Connexion with its Physical Geology." He then gave 

 Vol. XXXVI, — No. 9 37. 



no uncertain sound as far as his own convictions went, 

 but he admitted in his preface that the views to which he 

 had been led ran directly counter to what were at that 

 time the prevailing impressions on the subject of the 

 book, and that he was prepared to find them disputed or 

 perhaps thrown aside as mere dreaming. Now, after a 

 lapse of twenty-two years, during which many a young 

 geologist has been hungering for access to the book long 

 out of print, a second edition appears, and the author is 

 able to state that these very views are accepted as part of 

 the general stock of geological knowledge. How largely 

 this result is due to his own steady and powerful advocacy 

 all geologists are aware ; but he gracefully reminds us 

 that we also owe much to the labours of those American 

 geologists who have found in the Western Territories 

 such convincing instances of the work of denudation in 

 shaping the surface, and have further brought these 

 instances to our doors by means of the admirable illus- 

 trations of them which they have supplied in such pro- 

 fusion, and which the American Government distribute 

 so liberally among the geologists of the whole world. 



The first part of Dr. Geikie's book deals with land- 

 sculpture in general, and describes the working of Nature's 

 sculpturing tools. It is possible that, here and in the cor- 

 responding portions of other geological works, sufficient 

 stress is not laid on the paramount importance of frost 

 among those denuding agents which are generally classed 

 together as " sub-aerial." We might almost say that the 

 results of its work exceed in importance those of all the 

 other denuding forces put together. Such was the im- 

 pression made upon me when it was once my lot to spend 

 an autumn and winter at St. Bees. South of the bold 

 scarp of St. Bees Head the coast is formed by a line of 

 low cliffs of Boulder Clay, and on a strip of smooth sand 

 at the foot of these it was my practice to take my daily 

 " constitutional." The summer had been hot and dry, 

 and the clay was abundantly cracked ; the autumn 

 was a time of incessant and often heavy rain. This 

 almost continuous downpour produced but little destruc- 

 tion ; streams of mud stained every here and there the 

 clean sand, but the amount carried down was insignificant. 

 Then came one night's frost, and the beach next day was 

 a sight not easily forgotten. Huge masses of clay, some 

 half as big as a small cottage, cumbered the shore all 

 along ; that single night's frost wrought more havoc than 

 the deluge of rain which had been pouring down during 

 the preceding three months almost without cessation. 



Having cleared the ground by a preliminary exposition 

 of the principles that are to be our guide, the author takes 

 us away to the Highlands. He insists on the fact that 

 there is nothing in Scotland that can be called a moun- 

 tain chain in the scientific sense of the expression, and 

 enforces, both by verbal description and apt pictorial 

 illustration, the truth that, when from some commanding 

 height we look over the wild tumbled sea of the High- 

 land hills, it becomes forcibly borne in upon us that they 

 nearly all rise to about the same height. The conclu- 

 sions to be drawn are that the country was first of all 

 worn down by denudation to an approximately uniform 

 level, and that the valleys are merely ditches dug out by 

 sub-aerial denuding agents across this old table-land. 

 No visitor to the Highlands, who has on a clear day from 

 some point of vantage looked around over the landscape 



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